Still Small Voice

The fiction of Robert Walser.

Walser hiking in 1937, some years after he stopped writing entirely.Credit CARL SEELIG/R. WALSER FOUNDATION/KEYSTONE

In “Jakob von Gunten,” the 1909 novel by the German-speaking Swiss writer Robert Walser, the hero adopts the motto “To be small and to stay small.” The words apply just as well to Walser himself, whose life and work played out as a relentless diminuendo. The up-and-coming young novelist of the period before the First World War, capable of producing three novels in as many years, turned to shorter forms, and saw his audience and his income dwindle gradually through the war years and the nineteen-twenties. Once a fixture of smart Berlin society, Walser exchanged the world of salons for a series of tiny furnished rooms and, finally, in 1929, a mental institution. Even his handwriting diminished; he was able to squeeze a last novel—a short one, but still—onto just twenty-four sides of octavo-size paper. For years, some scholars believed that the script in which Walser composed this novel, “The Robber,” and many other later works was an uncrackable private code, and not until 1972, fifteen years after his death, did transcriptions from the so-called Bleistiftgebiet, or “pencil area,” begin to appear. The publication, starting in the eighties, of six volumes of painstakingly transcribed texts brought to light some of Walser’s most beautiful and haunting writing, and reinforced his posthumous reputation in German. The incredible shrinking writer is a major twentieth-century prose artist who, for all that the modern world seems to have passed him by, fulfills the modern criterion: he sounds like nobody else.

In Walser’s case, this means that he achieved a remarkable tone, in which perfect assurance and perfect ambiguity combine. His narrators are all ostensibly humble, courteous, and cheerful; the puzzle lies in deciding where they are speaking in earnest and where ironically. Three of Walser’s four surviving novels are now available in English, along with several collections of stories quarried by various translators—most notably Christopher Middleton and Susan Bernofsky—from the ten volumes of short prose that Walser published during his lifetime, and the deep trove of deciphered microscripts. The most recently translated novel, “The Assistant” (New Directions; translated by Bernofsky; $16.95), abounds in declarations like “How tasty the coffee was again today.” No irony there—and you can read a lot of Walser without finding a single mention of food, drink, weather, clothing, architecture, or cigars that is not entirely appreciative. Joseph, the assistant, also enjoys swimming on his days off: “What swimming person, provided he is not about to drown, can help being in excellent spirits?” The proviso about drowning introduces a dark flutter of ambiguity, but, generally speaking, Walser’s narrators claim to be in excellent spirits even when they are drowning: “Of course, I like sorrow very much as well, it’s very valuable, very.” Sometimes Walser seems a sort of saint of cosmic compliance. At other times, in his good-natured acceptance of all things, he appears to be mocking the very possibility of such an attitude: “I only know that all the poor people work in the factory, perhaps as a punishment for being so poor.” Indeed, the Walser tone, hovering between beatific quietism and a burlesque of conventionality, is detectable in the immortal reply he gave a man who visited him at an asylum and asked about his writing: “I am not here to write, but to be mad.”

The seventh of eight children, Robert Walser was born in Biel, Switzerland, on April 15, 1878. On his mother’s side were peasants and artisans, and, on his father’s, pastors, including, in his grandfather, a frankly utopian social reformer whose activism cost him his clerical collar and inspired reactionaries to fire shots at his windows. The grandfather kept the bullets as souvenirs, and may also have passed on some of his politics to his grandson; Walser several times sketches a utopia of freedom and equality which seems to have arrived not by revolution but, in very Swiss fashion, through a sort of universal politeness and consideration.

Walser’s father was a struggling bookbinder, though it is his mother, Elisa, who seems to have loomed larger. According to Catherine Sauvat, Walser’s French biographer (there is also a German biography, by Robert Mächler), Elisa Walser’s periods of depressive withdrawal were often followed by bouts of rage in which she reproached her children either for tormenting her or for ignoring her. Despite a household climate of financial insecurity and mental illness, the Walser siblings were a lively and talented brood who took great pleasure in one another’s company; by far Robert’s closest friends in life were his brother Karl and his sister Lisa. Still, given that not one of six boys and two girls became a parent, it’s hard not to suspect the enduring presence of some shared childhood unhappiness. The eldest brother died at fifteen; the other siblings became teachers (one of whom preceded Walser to the Waldau mental institution, and another of whom committed suicide), an artist, a banker, the wife of a matchstick-company manager, and—in Robert himself—a writer who can seem a reductio ad absurdum of the good child: cheerful and polite in all circumstances and ready to see the justice of any punishment he receives.

The family could not afford to send Robert to school past the age of fourteen, and before devoting himself to writing he worked as a clerk at a bank, in an elastics factory, and for a luckless inventor. He also attended an academy for servants and was briefly a butler in a Silesian castle. Walser put all of this to use in his writing, and, as a novelist, he can be placed in that comic tradition of European clerking fiction that runs from Gogol through Kafka and down to José Saramago. However, unlike Kafka—who admired “Jakob von Gunten” and whose own first book was hailed by Robert Musil as “a special case of the Walser type”—Walser did not find it possible to hold down a job and write at the same time. His frustration with clerkly existence is evident in the deadpan story “Job Application”:

Esteemed Gentlemen,

I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. . . . Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-reaching sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. . . . Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream?—I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid.

The passage shows the tightness of Walser’s switchbacks from sweetness to sarcasm and back to sweetness again. It also offhandedly announces his credo—everything small and modest is beautiful and pleasing—and establishes the depth of his affinity with Kafka. After all, Kafka in one of his letters makes the same curious declaration—“Indeed I am a Chinese”—and cherished the idea of smallness in a similar way: “Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small, or being so.” For both writers, smallness implied a drastic aversion to power, the exercise of it as well as submission to it. And Walser’s notion of smallness came to enfold the entire world. In a late sketch, he is still dreaming of China:

Nobody there is so foolish as to believe himself better than his fellow beings. I think of the Chinese as people polite and happy in equal measure, as friendly as they are helpful. There, modesty is the crowning glory of sentiment. . . . China is teeming with people, but nobody vexes anyone. . . . The human traffic is like an ocean.

In 1904, when Walser was twenty-six, he saw his first book published, a collection of essays on everything and nothing by the fictional naïf Fritz Kocher. Among Kocher’s observations are that leaves fall to the ground in autumn, that country fairs are useful and pleasant, and that “more people perish than want to.” Walser had assembled the essays over several years, while working intermittently in and around Zurich and Bern, and once they had appeared between two covers he felt emboldened to move to Berlin and seek his fortune there.

In Berlin, he moved in with his brother Karl (a notable illustrator and stage-set designer) and attempted to live by his pen. He didn’t do badly at first, and his literary success, along with his brother’s connections, secured him a place in German artistic circles, where he was sometimes governed by an imp of the perverse. As adolescents, he and Karl had apparently perfected the art of perching in a high window and throwing their hats onto the heads of passersby, and their mischief persisted in adulthood. One evening at a party, they challenged the famous playwright Frank Wedekind to a bout of Hosenlupf (literally, “trouser-hoist”), a Swiss wrestling variant that makes inventive use of an opponent’s waistband. When Wedekind, discomfited, fled to a café, his tormentors pursued him, hailing him with friendly, if cryptic, cries of “Muttonhead!” and causing him to get caught up in a revolving door. On another occasion, in a literary salon, Walser interrupted the high-flown talk by seizing a young Englishwoman’s leg and praising her small feet.

This sort of behavior made Walser stand out in Berlin, as did his Swiss-German dialect and his lack of formal education. And his acquaintances—he had few friends and, it seems, in the course of his life, not a single lover of either sex—were thereby confronted with the same question as his readers: where did innocence and joy end and playacting begin? In later years, stung by his failure to be taken seriously as a writer, Walser claimed that the ingenuousness was just an act: “My vocation, my mission, consists mainly in making every effort to keep my audience believing that I am truly simple. I give them the illusion that unspoiledness and naïveté still exist.” But it can be hard to tell. When Walser met Lenin in Zurich, during the war, all he had to say was “So you, too, like fruitcake?”

“The Assistant,” which was written in Berlin a hundred years ago, in a six-week sprint, and appeared in 1908, is only Walser’s second published novel, and here his innocence seems more truly innocent than is sometimes the case. Told from the point of view of Joseph, an impoverished young clerk who joins the employ and the household of a precariously solvent inventor named Tobler, the story might be defined in terms of the intersection of two motions: the daily up and down of Joseph’s moods, and the relentless decline of his master’s fortunes. Joseph, “a passionate smoker,” puffs on Herr Tobler’s cheroots and consumes Tobler’s food with the relish of a man who has known hunger. He also likes taking walks in the woods and chatting up Tobler’s mercurial wife. Joseph’s more anxious moods arrive when he fears that he will lose access to these pleasures, either because Tobler goes broke or because his own tendency to do “stupid things”—he sometimes has the cheek to address his betters as their equal—gets him fired:

“Could it be possible for me to live without doing stupid things? And in this household I do them so splendidly. . . . And how can I think of existing without drinking Herr Tobler’s coffee? . . . And in whose neatly covered and turned-down beds do I intend to go to sleep afterwards? No doubt beneath the arches of some cozy bridge!”

“The Assistant” is full of such pell-mell soliloquies, and it’s no wonder that Walser soon abandoned third-person narration for the more congenial mode of the monologue. The aspect of his style already perfected here is the beautiful abstractness of his descriptions: “Autumn was arriving, everything appeared to be sitting down, somewhere something was coming to a standstill, nature seemed at times to be rubbing its eyes.” When Herr Tobler flies into drunken hysterics, we are told, “Masculine and human rationality was now bawling and jeering and babbling.”

Walser’s clerks and layabouts are perhaps the nicest, most considerate people you can meet in modernist fiction, but they can also be cuttingly ironic in the way of only the very polite: that “cozy” bridge to sleep under, that “masculine and human” rationality. Susan Bernofsky reproduces this effect and others with impressive fluency and naturalness, and she must also have enjoyed dusting off words like “swillpot” and “thunderation.” It’s only too bad that, for want of such a translation, Virginia Woolf never learned that the desire she expressed in her 1919 essay “Modern Fiction” for a more impressionistic and less narrowly empirical modern novel, a novel of floating sensibility rather than fixed characters, had been, to such a remarkable degree, anticipated a dozen years earlier by a Swiss writer living in Berlin.

Something else Woolf wrote in her essay seems to apply to Walser: “If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work on his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style.” To this Walser adds a certain specification of what it would mean to be a free man. After all, for Herr Tobler and his wife, there is a love interest (their marriage) and a catastrophe (their bankruptcy); for their assistant Joseph there is neither. And Joseph doesn’t need the disciplined temperament of a successful entrepreneur, since he isn’t trying to be one. He can simply decline to be yelled at anymore and, as he does on the last page of the book, walk off down the hill: no paycheck, but no debts, either. If Joseph seems remarkably unconcerned about where his future wages will come from, this may be because “The Assistant” describes the last serious job that Walser held before moving to Berlin. The book is a covert Künstlerroman, its hero on his way to becoming an artist.

“Jakob von Gunten” is Walser’s next Berlin novel—and a masterpiece, not least of ambiguity. Jakob has enrolled in a school for servants in order to learn humility, an effort that seems, at first, to be imposed by necessity, since, despite his aristocratic surname, Jakob is almost penniless and needs to make a living somehow: “As an old man I shall have to serve young and confident and badly educated ruffians, or I shall be a beggar, or I shall perish.” Later, his attitude is more complicated:

If I were rich, I wouldn’t travel around the world. To be sure, that would not be so bad. But I can see nothing wildly exciting about getting a fugitive acquaintance with foreign places. In general I would decline to educate myself, as they say, any further. I would be attracted by deep things and by the soul, rather than by distances and things far off. . . . And I wouldn’t buy anything either. I would make no acquisitions. . . . I would walk about on foot, just as usual, with the consciously secret intention of not letting people notice very much how regally rich I am. . . . It would never occur to me to take a cab. Only people who are in a hurry or want to put on noble airs do that. But I wouldn’t want to put on noble airs, and I would be in no hurry whatever.

You can read this passage several times without figuring out whether it constitutes a declaration of the sublimest contentment, given that Jakob’s fantasy of wealth is identical to the reality of his poverty, or whether Walser is saying something else—that only a rich man could enjoy the simple life, since only then would simplicity be his free choice. So it is reading Walser: you catch a glimpse of real spiritual nobility, and then wonder whether the very idea of such a thing—spiritual nobility, in a world of rich and poor—isn’t meant as a sarcastic joke.

What’s beyond doubt is that Walser spent a good deal of his life on foot and in no hurry. Homesickness and poverty compelled him back to Switzerland in 1913, and, in the next decade and a half, he seems to have been out walking whenever he was not at his desk or asleep in bed. From now on, Walser concentrated on short prose, and it is tempting to suppose that his prodigious rambling contributed to the style of his later stories. “Stories,” in fact, is not the word for these feuilletonistic flights of prose; they are squibs, sketches, anecdotes, essays, fantasies, or an unstable compound of all those. It’s remarkable to see what variety and richness, what easiness and charm, what winsome inanities and philosophical depths he could pack into half a page of one late sketch alone, as in “Boat Trip”:

Odd similarities between things at rest and things flowing occurred to me during the trip that I, too, participated in, and I would have been delighted to have been as fascinating a storyteller as one person there, who was asked to invent a tale so that the outing not become boring. . . . Here and there fish, driven it seemed by an uncontrollable curiosity, bobbed upward from the depths to visibility, as though wishing to help the listeners be satisfied with the tale. On fish one finds no arms. Is that why they have such huge eyes and expressive mouths? Is it because they have no legs that they make the best swimmers?. . . A girl sitting with us in the boat compared traveling over the water to the imperceptible gliding and progress of growth, that of fruit for example, which perhaps would have little desire to ripen if it knew to what end.

In his “Essay on Freedom,” Walser seems to be describing at once his own nature and the mode of his later prose: “Freedom wants both to be understood and to be almost continuously not understood; it wants to be seen and then again to be as if it were not there.” Tempting as it is to wring one’s hands over the philistine reading public that was not eager to sponsor Walser in the growing freedom of his writing, really it’s remarkable that the editors of ordinary newspapers—one of whom received threats of cancelled subscriptions unless the “nonsense” stopped—published any of this work at all. In the end, not surprisingly, they were unwilling to run much more of it. Walser could afford to rent only the meanest of furnished rooms, one of which a visitor inventoried thus: “There was only a bed, a table, and a chair. A cheap map of Europe was tacked to the wall.” As his public grew smaller, Walser began to compose much of his work, in his almost indecipherably tiny and abbreviated script, without any expectation of publication; but we should not conclude from this that he didn’t care about recognition. In being understood and almost continually not understood, both parts were important, and one of the threads holding together “The Robber,” written in 1925, is the Walser figure’s concern with his reception as a writer and as a person: “Local men of the world call me a simpleton because novels don’t tumble out of my pockets.” “The Robber” itself, more an assemblage of passages than a novel in any ordinary sense, did not tumble into the world until 1972—a fitting date for a beautiful, unsummarizable work every bit as self-reflexive as anything produced by the metafictionists of the sixties and seventies.

In 1929, Walser was brought by his sister Lisa to the Waldau mental institution, in Bern (where their brother Ernst, given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, had lived for eighteen years, until his death, in 1916). To be sure, Walser was not quite normal psychologically, and his later work can sometimes be reminiscent of the alternately friendly and menacing private universes elaborated by other institutionalized “outsider artists.” But he seems to have suffered more from unhappiness, isolation, and poverty than from anything else. Neither the admitting doctor’s report nor the testimony of those who met and spoke with Walser during his last decades render his diagnosis of schizophrenia very persuasive. Walser’s brothers Karl and Oscar believed that he simply preferred life at Waldau to life outside (and for that reason ultimately refused to contribute to his keep). They were probably right: Walser could now devote himself to writing without having to worry about earning a living, while the presence of others relieved him of some portion of his solitude. Rather than take his own room, Walser chose to sleep, barracks style, among the other inmates, though his taste for company did not extend to conversation. One of his last prose pieces describes a pretty girl who steadfastly rebuffs all offers of dinner, gondola rides, and flowers; she prefers to sit alone in the sun, “luxuriating in the simplicity of her wants.”

Walter Benjamin, in an essay from 1929, made the ingenious suggestion that Walser’s cheerful people must all be convalescents; only recovered health could explain the intense pleasure they take in absolutely everything. More recently, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben offered a gloss on the flatness, the thus-ness, of Walser’s frequently very matter-of-fact prose: this, he says, is how the world of left-behind objects and people will look after the Messiah has come and gone, abandoned in what Agamben calls the Irreparable. That works, too, for much of Walser’s writing, though it doesn’t cover the ironic moments. In these, it truly seems as if Walser has been laid under a curse: permitted only to speak well of the world, he is forced to express any sorrow or rage he feels in terms of the most unequivocal praise. The resulting sense of torment, endlessness, and absurdity puts one in mind of Kafka again.

In 1933, Waldau came under new management and Walser was moved to another asylum. He did not protest this plan at first, but when the day came he refused to get out of bed and had to be taken away by force. In the new asylum, in Herisau, in his native canton of Appenzell, Walser received visits from a man of letters named Carl Seelig, who oversaw the reissue of some of Walser’s work and made a record of his conversations with the writer. It was Seelig to whom Walser said that his role was no longer to write but to be mad, and he also gave Seelig what might be taken as an explanation for his abandonment of writing following his forcible transfer: “The only ground on which a writer can produce is that of freedom.” For several years, Seelig petitioned for Walser’s release, but without success, and Walser remained an inmate of the Herisau asylum until he died, out on one of his long walks, on Christmas Day, 1956. Someone had the sang-froid to snap a photograph: footprints in the snow lead to a tall man lying with one arm thrown behind his head, for all the world as if his last gesture had been to toss off the hat that lies a few feet away. ♦

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